SEMrush Digital Marketing Show 2019 Strategies For The Entrepreneurial Challenges

Once again, CedCommerce landed a great opportunity to dig deeper and learn right from the source of expertise when it comes to Digital Marketing 2019 with its cousin Content Marketing 2019.

“Survival is the need of the hour for every business. Join the webinar and catch experts from Google talking about tips & tactics on how to streamline your marketing efforts effectively that will help you to sustain your business amidst the on-going crisis.

Five members were in attendance at the SEMrush Conference 2019 or as SEMrush is calling it, the Biggest Digital Marketing Show of 2019, which reportedly, it was.

Mr. Gaurav Mani (Manager of Product and Growth), Mr. Shubham Nigam (Business Product Manager), Mr. Pradeep Kumar (Marketing Strategist), Mr. Arpan Srivastava (Business Project Manager), and Mr. Himanshu Vaish (Marketing Manager) were there in the Conference to represent the team.

Now is the time to retrace the path of the enlightening journey down the Digital Marketing lane.

With so much to learn, we must say #SEMrushConf2019 was a mega hit. It was great attending sessions by eCommerce tycoons like @Google @HubSpot and others. Thank you @SEMrush for organizing such a splendid event in India ??. We look forward to attending more such events. pic.twitter.com/mgGCXKIadc

— CedCommerce (@cedcommerce) December 5, 2019

The State of Content

The round with Miss. Olga Andrienko, Head of Global Marketing at SEMrush who specializes in conversion and relationship marketing was remarkable. For her part, Olga gave an Introduction to the current state of the Content Marketing 2019. She gave briefings on what content would be like in 2020, depending upon the current trends.

As per the stats she brought forward:

1. 77% of companies have a content marketing strategy and around 48% describe it as average. While 46% of companies invest only $10,000 on Content Marketing.
2. Whereas, 78% of companies have three or fewer members in the Content Marketing Team.
3. She spoke about content marketing goals, where the major focus of 75% of companies was to work on generating more quality leads.
4. Additionally, the session revealed that creating content that generates quality leads, is the biggest challenge that around 54% of the companies claim to face.

Apart from these, several other crucial details concerning Content, Content Optimization and distribution came out in the open, guiding the listeners in coming up with a new strategy.

A piece of key advice from the session that Mr. Gaurav Mani took away is:

“Create Content for Google and People… Content and SEO should be married… Try to work on alternate ways too like it is difficult to rank on any specific keyword then try to create Video for the same, write Quora, Posts, etc.” -From Olga Andrienko’s Session on The State of Content, SEMrush Digital Marketing Show 2019.

Marketing in 2020 and beyond: Why Businesses should kill the funnel and focus on Flywheel

The splendid session advocated a completely new take on the Marketing trends in light of the changes trending in the field of technology and in the mindsets of consumers. Starting off with some surprising statistics, Mr. Shahid Nizami, APAC Managing Director at HubSpot, made a very valid point.

Some of the key stats were:

1. Customers are less patient now and expect an instant response almost 90% of the time. As a matter of fact, what is more, surprising is their skepticism. Customers do not even trust the doctors 51% of the time.
2. Businesses argue that 55% of the time, their best referrals come from word of mouth and salesperson is effective only 22% of times.
3. It is no longer about just growing, but the focus is on growing better. Now Inbound is the method that requires a lot of consideration and action. Customers expect businesses to provide value and earn trust. The method relies upon Attracting, Engaging, and delighting customers.
4. He emphasized upon changing the funnel of Marketing and Sales to a Flywheel with the customer in the center and Services as a key edge. Whereas, Inbound makes sure that the wheel flies perfectly.

Mr. Nizami spoke in depth about the analysis of how they changed the whole business strategy where the initial focus was upon self-centered strategies by moving the complete focus on the needs and demands of the customers. “We were, much satisfied to realize that we already consider our clients the top priority no matter what.”

“Four F’s are:

1. Funnel: Drop the Sales Funnel.
2. Flywheel: Adapt the customer-centric flywheel with Service as a wing.
3. Force: Get into Inbound with force.
4. Friction: Focus on Customer Satisfaction to reduce the friction of Flywheel.”

–Shahid Nizami, Marketing in 2020 and beyond: Why Businesses should kill the funnel and focus on Flywheel, SEMrush Digital Marketing Show 2019.

Lead Generation Strategy

As a prospective lead, how much interested do you have to be in order to fill out a 10 field long Contact Form?

Tough question yeah? Well, an extremely interestingly obvious yet not well-realized fact came out in the limelight during the session of Lead Generation Strategy by Miss. Michelle Morgan, Director of Client Services at Clix Marketing. The session starts out with a distinction between the simplistic sales model of an eCommerce website against a lead generation model for any business. Advocating the importance of getting Qualified leads instead of merely creating a database, she talks about the right stage time to ask for information.

Here are the key elements of successfully generating Leads:

1. The most expensive Call to Action such as a Demo of your top seller is not always effective enough. The reason behind this is that customers need to be first informed about the product and then try taking a look at the product; Which, she calls as giving value to your customers first, before trying to sell your pitch.
2. As per a stat, 131% of times, customers will buy the product once they receive substantial information that truly satisfies their confusion. This calls for attention to improve the content effectively.
3. Additionally, she also recommends creating appropriate and cost-effective CTAs at all stages of the funnel which contains:
   1. Awareness: CTA could be Video
   2. Interest: Content can be a CTA at this stage
   3. Consideration: Allow tools to solidify the considerations.
   4. Action: Let them check out the Demo of the product to achieve conversion.
4. Her advice indicates that focusing on existing known leads requires lesser attention in comparison to targeting new lead generation.
5. The correct length of the Contact Form is a question we struggle to answer most of the time. A short Contact Form creates leads at a greater scale, in comparison to a small one. Whereas a longer form brings about qualified leads of interested people who are easy to convert. As a matter of fact, out of 70 leads generated from a short contact form, only 25% are qualified leads.
6. Furthermore, she explained how to save yourself from investing in duplicate leads as well as using CRM to make sure you can properly follow up on People.

The session was a rich package of very deep, well-explained insights and semantics of Quality Leads along with an efficient yet cost-effective contact form.

“Don’t Always jump to the most expensive CTA…..Better yet, why not provide some value to your customers?” -Michelle Morgan, Lead Generation Strategy, SEMrush Digital Marketing Show 2019.

Turning Clicks into customers: Unlocking the power of CRO

With a box of assorted chocolates, the session dived into the difficult analysis of Landing Pages and its after-effects. Miss. Shahina Meru, Senior Manager – CRO at Merkle EMEA, walked the members of the audience down the lane of Landing Pages. She advocated that the relevant content is the key to gaining higher Conversion Rate Optimization.

Some of the key aspects of the session are:

1. The best way to design a relevant Landing Page needs to have well-researched Data-rich content. Thus, research is of major importance.
2. User Empathy is the best way to obtain the best results out of the Landing Pages.
3. Do not think just from your point of view. Customers are diverse, take their perception in mind.
4. The relevance of content implies accommodating the right message for the right person delivered at the right time. With these three elements in mind, the different aspects that one can look at are:
   1. Symmetrical Messaging on the Landing Page: Right Message
   2. Anchoring: Right Message
   3. Understanding Audiences: Right Message, Right Person
   4. Customer Journey Relevance: Right Message, Right Person, Right Time.

Shahina Meru’s take on all things CRO implies optimization of Landing Page, taking care of cognitive biases and optimizing your landing page depending upon that analysis. And, this optimization should be done with the Audience in the focus. The customer’s journey should be a memorable one for the optimum effect.

“Be relevant and Turn Clicks into customers.” -Shahina Meru, Turning Clicks into customers: Unlocking the power of CRO, SEMrush Digital Marketing Show 2019

Start a Business

Speaking about the 360-degree monitoring to control the growth, Mr. Vargab Bakshi, Partnerships & Business Development For & Head (India, South, Asia) at Shopify Inc, gave some splendid counsel to people starting a new business.

Some of the major subjects in discussion during the session were:

1. Branding is about deciding and projecting your business values appropriately so that customers can accept and trust you. To earn authenticity and credibility, being honest, and spending the energy in that direction will lead you to grow as a brand.
2. The contract should reflect your actions and how you are going to treat your customers in the future. A contract clearly lays down the boundaries beforehand. They save you from lawsuits and prevent any scenario where you lose money. Correct use of SLAs can help you bloom safely.
3. Educating customers helps a ton, make sure the customers know what you have got. You can go with videos in the listings and other forms of information that can make the customers more aware of your product and then choose.

Vargab, in addition to this, advocates selling Time, Thinking, and Technology that present the money-making opportunities.

“Your brand must permeate every facet of what you do and be made real in everything you create, from your core product to an off-the-cuff note you write to a valued customer.” -Vargab Bakshi, Start a Business, SEMrush Digital Marketing Show 2019

Cool tips from Alyce Erikson’s (@LinkedIn) #SMM workshop⬇️#semrushconf2019 https://t.co/6GTC5m07Mz

— SEMrush (@semrush) December 5, 2019

Building and Scaling Product Marketing Teams for SaaS Companies

The most effective way to go with Marketing of SaaS Products is to balance three teams that are, Product Marketing, Demand Generation, and Brand Generation.

Mr. Praval Singh, Head of Marketing at Zoho.com, gave a great session on how to go about the Building and Scaling of Product Marketing Teams for SaaS Companies.

The key elements were:

1. Product Marketing is about improving marketing efficiency. Analyzing the users of your products, what do the customers think of the product, and how are you presenting the product to the customers.
2. The most important aspect is to send the right message about your products. Making sure that your team and the customers, see the product exactly the way you want them to.
3. The best product marketer should be able to properly perceive the Products, Customers, and Market. Apart from this, it is crucial to see, Targeting, Positioning and Messaging, Pricing, and SKUs, etc.
4. Working on generating Awareness, strategizing Conversion and Keeping up the Engagements are essentials of Product Marketer’s task.

And that was the session for Business Craft by Marketing Expert, Praval Singh.

“When should you hire a Product Marketing Lead? (Product Marketing Lead) Should be the first non-tech hire, sometimes even before you hire the Head of Sales. Because it then helps demand generation and brand marketing teams understand the customer better.” -Praval Singh, Building and Scaling Product Marketing Teams for SaaS Companies, SEMrush Digital Marketing Show 2019

Harnessing the power of many

One of the most compelling and impressive sessions focusing upon the Culture and power of community was that of Mr. Anshuman Kumar, Head – Global Brand & Corporate Communications at Intuit.

The most distinguished yet effective technique to go for Company Culture and Brand Experience is to focus on letting your employees be the image of your company. Branding is complete only with Personalization. His question, “How do we tell our story?” gets us thinking.

The key elements of his session were:

1. Widening Channels of Influence requires every person associating with the brand to spread out the span of people and multiply the reach to a larger audience.
2. Anshuman professes about empowering employees to enhance the brand experience. He talks about how Intuit made employees, the face of their campaign.
3. Intuit refers to all its employees as the Brand Ambassadors. What is more interesting is the two business models formed by them involves:
   1. Customer-Driven Innovation (CDI): What to Solve The success lies in the middle of all of this, you need to:
      1. Go about discovering an important unsolved problem of a customer.
      2. That you can solve.
      3. And from there on build a solution to your advantage.
   2. Design for Delight: How to Solve Build the model to achieve complete Delight stage for your customers:
      1. Work hard for Deep Customer empathy
      2. Think broader and then start funneling to a narrower aspect.
      3. Do not be scared to progressively experiment with customers.

“I believe in Innovation. I am Intuit.” becomes the tag line of Intuit with a picture of one of the employees of Intuit, driving their motto. They know how to use employees as the Branding Tool, Agents of Change, and Ambassadors of Awesome.

“People will forget what you said. People will forget what you did. But people will never forget how you made them feel.” -Maya Angelou, Rightly used by Anshuman Kumar, Harnessing the power of many, SEMrush Digital Marketing Show 2019

Win your SEO Battle: Become a BaahuBali of Modern Organic Marketing

Who doesn’t want to be BaahuBali (A person who has strong arms) when it comes to SEO. Mr. Lukasz Zelezny, SEO Consultant at SEO. London gave an awesome talk on SEO using the analogy of Bahubali (2015 Indian epic action film).

The major subjects under scrutiny for the session were:

1. URL Indexation
2. How to perform GAP Analysis
3. Snapshot-to improve existing rankings

Using SEMrush, you can improve the business unlike anyone has done ever before.

“GAP Analysis helps you catch competitors faster, find relevant keywords and realizing what is worth to rank on.” -Lukasz Zelezny, Win your SEO Battle: Become a BaahuBali of Modern Organic Marketing, SEMrush Marketing Show 2019

Is your Business Ready For Voice Search?

The ever-changing trends highlight that people are going screenless now. They are looking for a seamless experience when it comes to using the internet. Little limitations such as people doing some work shouldn’t come in the way of their quest for quick answers. The point was well made by Miss. Benu Aggarwal, Founder, and president of Milestone Internet Marketing at her Session.

She started with great insights into how people are interacting with the internet. Such as preferring questions over simple searches, Small or rather Screenless devices, etc.

Here are a few interesting stats that can give a new outlook to your strategies:

1. About 65% of people make searches from their mobile phones. Whereas, 50% of the searches are going to be Voice searches and 30% of these will be from screenless devices by the year 2020.
2. The reason why people prefer Voice Searches because they are in the middle of doing one of the following activities:
   1. Driving (52.8%)
   2. Doing another activity: (21.3%)
   3. Watching TV: (7.5%)
   4. Working: (7.4-8%)
   5. Cooking: (5.5%)
   6. Exercising or Walking: (2.6%)
   7. Showering or using the bathroom: (2.3%)
   8. With Family or Friends: (0.4%)
   9. In Bed: (0.2%)

She spoke about one of the most buzzing subjects that have caused quite a rift among the Search Engine experts. BERT brought several questions as to what we can all do to keep up with it and most of us returned empty-handed. Benu Aggarwal explained how BERT has made sure that Search engines better understand human intent. Which directly affects Voice Search and thus requires you to work harder for achieving Featured Snippets.

She walked the audience through the must-haves of Voice Searches and Rich Featured Snippets.

“Your domain must have: Authority: Consistent Qualitative Links and Citation Technical SEO: Indexability and Crawlability Relevancy: Relevant, Fresh and Conversational Speed and Mobile-First Optimization Clickability: Entities, UX and Layout” -Benu Aggarwal, Is your Business Ready For Voice Search?, SEMrush Marketing Show, 2019

Digital: The First Frontier and the Last Mile

A fantastic and energetic take on the “Third Wave” and how it changes the future of the business. Mr. Sandeep Singh, Spotlight and last served as VP-Marketing ( India & MEA ) at Bira 91 talks about connecting with the Physical World through complete digitization. Declaring that we no longer go online, rather that is where we live, showered some light on the Journey of Customers.

He says, every customer, goes through the following stages of their online journey, from gaining cognizance to taking Action:

1. Awareness
2. Interest
3. Evaluation
4. Action

He speaks about how awareness begins from Video (YouTube) or Written Content (Instagram and other Social Platforms). They further move on to the Interest Stage, which leads them to look out for more information about the product. You need to be ready when your customers reach this stage. The three pillars of achieving these are Data, Direct, and Digital.

“The biggest fear of our Generation is Low Network Strength, Buffering and Low Battery.” –Sandeep Singh, Digital: The First Frontier and the Last Mile, SEMrush Marketing Show 2019

Smarter with Search

The future of Searches in the year 2020 was brought onto the stage during a session by none other than a specialist form Google itself. Miss. Smriti Raghvan, Performance Specialist Search and Shopping at Google, was there with a power-packed session about consumer behavior when it comes to searching online.

The new front of Searches now involves:

1. Answers, Journeys and personal Assistance: Seamless flow of information with no barriers.
2. Engaging, Visual Ways of finding Information instead of having to go through the text.
3. Automation all around no matter where you focus on, to double the profits, especially when it comes to Ads.
4. Responsive Search Ads (RSA): Ultimate targeting of Audience by targeting them with ads that customizes itself to relay the most relevant message. ML is the key to achieve that.
5. Dynamic Search Ads: Autogenerating an Ad by crawling the advertiser’s website and modifying the headline to direct the Customers directly to the correct Landing Page.
6. Some other Automations that make Google Ads Smarter are Smart Bidding, Attribution, Optimization Score, and Budget Planning.

Conclusively, the session was absolutely marvelous and informative to the extreme.

“Four things to Remember today! Search is ever-evolving and changing. Automate creatives with RSA and DSA. Smart-Bidding offers Solutions for every goal. Benefit from Optimization Score recommendations.” –Smriti Raghvan, Smarter with Search, SEMrush Marketing Show 2019

Inspire Action with Display

The next step to advertising is making sure what you display through your Ads is actually retained in the minds of Customers. And as per, Miss. Sheetal Virmani, Display Specialist Performance Solutions at Google, customers retain the most when they are relaxed and receptive. Additionally, they are more receptive when they are in the mind frame to browse and educate themselves. Thus, to achieve this goal she recommends the Google Display Network.

Google Display Ads offers Automated Solutions to drive performance at Scale:

1. Owned and Operated Inventory
   1. YouTube Mastheads
   2. YouTube Home feed
   3. Gmail Ads
   4. Discover (Google Feed)
2. Outcome-based Bidding
   1. Enhance CPC
   2. Maximize Conversions
   3. Target CPA/ROAS
   4. Pay Per Conversions
3. DR Performance Formats
   1. Smart Display Campaigns
   2. Responsive Display Ads
   3. Universal App Campaigns
   4. Feed-based
4. Shopping Goals
   1. Smart Shopping/ Showcase/ Shoppable
   2. Local Campaigns
   3. Store Visits Reporting

The session also involved a section on Smart Display Campaigns 2.0. Elaborating how Machine Learning leverages user signals to drive the traffic right into the physical store. That is not just it. You get an accurate analysis of how your Ads are doing.

“What is Discovery? Achieving Stronger Intent SIgnals, Authentic Creatives that Deliver Results and Cross Product.” –Sheetal Virmani, Inspire Action with Display, SEMrush Marketing Show 2019

Digital’s Influence on Omnichannel Behavior

Even for little information pertaining to Physical World is something people are increasingly turning to the internet for. In the Session, Miss. Anjuman Bhatt, Measurement Specialist Performance Solutions at Google, spoke about how every one-third of mobile searches are Location Related. Since 2017, the “Near Me” Searches have tripled. Google Maps are so ruling the Calls and Directions, in the count of billions.

Thus, going for Google My Business shouldn’t require much force, but still here are a few reasons:

1. Stand Out
2. Engage with Customers
3. Find New ones

Location extensions work great on different platforms and help make decisions more than anything else. Since with Visibility we also need visible results, Local Actions Reporting are much helpful as well.

“Consumers who are withing 5 miles of a store are 1.7x more likely to be incremental visitors. Mobile consumers are 1.5x likely to be incremental. While Ads exposed to your existing customers are 50% more likely to your existing customers are 50% more likely to drive incremental visits than ads exposed to new customers.” –Anjuman Bhatt, Digital’s Influence on Omnichannel Behavior, SEMrush Marketing Show 2019

Starstruck… only a little

Mr. Himanshu Vaish, Marketing Manager with CedCommerce, found himself a little starstruck. Apparently, he has been a fan of Digital Pratik for almost seven years now. He finds inspiration in the almost same set of people as Digital Pratik does and follows them across social media (including Garyvee, of course). Thus, with excitement in his voice, Himanshu told us, how his thought process matches that of Digital Pratik.

Now, Himanshu was not really prepared to meet one of his favorite stars, so when suddenly he came across Pratik, he was almost speechless. All he could say was, “I am a big fan of yours.” and they clicked a selfie together.

For Himanshu, this was a moment worth remembering for a long time.

Along with these aspects, you also need to verify how much sales are driven by these store visits. If you want to learn all about the sessions held at the Semrush Conference, grab the originals right from the source.

Let’s Just Say…

The event was an absolutely perfect ground for a lot of learnings and remodeling strategies. We never let go of an opportunity to grow, improve the way we do business and put in more and more efforts to serve our clients the best.

Everyone, at the Show, was extremely helpful and cooperative in handling the inquiries.

If you want to gain assistance with the Content and Digital Marketing, some experts can help you through.

The takeaways for the show will remain with the team for a long time, and we look forward to getting more such opportunities in the future.

Listen to our Spotify Podcast for emerging trends shaping the eCommerce in 2020!